Adrian Garelik

Token Incentives in Peer-to-Peer Distribution Networks

Adrián has teamed up with Federico Abad, creator of the popular peer-to-peer streaming video app, Popcorn Time, to release their fully decentralized, cryptocurrency-driven video sharing platform. Adrián writes:

On social networks there is an asset that is transferred and treasured called “Likes”. But they don’t have an actual value because no one ever ran out of Likes. Tokenizing this asset, turning it into some kind of Likecoin with limited issuance would add value to it by generating scarcity.

In the past, peer-to-peer distribution networks lacked incentives with which its users could be rewarded. Without this benefit the vast majority of the networks’ users only grab the content that interests them and rarely share. To solve this problem Flixxo will launch the Flixx token, that will be a reward for contributing by lending your bandwidth and storage space.

Today’s video streaming models like Netflix, Youtube, Amazon Prime and the social networks that have started producing their own videos such as Facebook and Snapchat, all rely on massive structural costs. Netflix, for example, spends almost $1 billion on infrastructure. Popcorn Time scaled to more than 100 million users within three years and has no structural costs at all.

Shifting The Incentive

During his presentation Adrián will explain his solution to this incentive problem — how, in the Flixxo economy, users can earn Flixx tokens for watching commercially sponsored content, like advertisements, but also how they can spend them to buy what they want to see without asking for Daddy’s credit card. He will also talk about how he plans to build a global economy for millennials and teenagers: to teach them to store and share digital assets like Flixx tokens and to exchange them for other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether.

As a script writer and film producer (“To fool a thief”, “Unsuscribe”), Adrián was always interested in new technologies for video distribution on the Internet. He founded the streaming service Filmika and the gaming platform Dyzo in 1998. From 2004 to 2014 he established the “Francis” DVD-rental store franchise. In 2011 he met Diego Gutierrez-Zaldivar, one of Argentina’s Internet pioneers, and together they created Cinepop, a democratic network for film distribution to the cinema. After learning about Bitcoin in 2014, he embarked on a quest for a blockchain-based video distribution that led to the foundation of RSK (also known as Rootstock), a smart contract platform on top of Bitcoin. Adrián was also responsible for RSK’s branding and identity.